With increased cellular traffic and a higher demand for reliable service, the management of unconnected calls has become more critical. The proliferation of mobile phone users continues to create challenges that may require assessing connectivity problems on mobile phone systems. System reliability becomes more critical, particularly to call centers that manage services to and from mobile vehicles. To improve system reliability, a telemetric call center would benefit from a method by which it can determine and diagnose where connectivity problems exist and solve them.
Mobile phones and telemetric units in mobile vehicles use prescribed frequencies in the 800 MHz analog band and in the 800 MHz, 900 MHz, 1900 MHz and higher digital cellular bands. While digital transmission technologies such as TDMA (time division multiple access), CDMA (code division multiple access) and GSM (global system for mobile telecommunications) have further increased the call capacity of digital cellular phone systems, the number of personal voice, data and telemetric calls also are continuing to multiply and are requiring higher transmission capacity. This additional traffic may result in more failed call attempts and dropped calls.
With no automatic or systematic way of detecting when and where calls are not connected, telemetric call centers may have difficulties in detecting, diagnosing and correcting connectivity problems in wireless carrier systems. Therefore, telemetric call centers would benefit from regular notification of connectivity problems and where, when, and why those problems exist. In that way, the systems of preferred wireless carriers would be monitored for satisfactory performance. Adjustments may be made to the mobile phone and modem in the telemetric unit, resulting in increased reliability of the telemetric services.
Ideally, the method of reducing connectivity problems would require no intervention from the user of a mobile phone or telemetric service unit in a mobile vehicle. A mobile phone or telemetric service unit would be able to proactively make intelligent decisions concerning connectivity and when queried, send reports about failed connections to the call center. With the information on failed call attempts, a telemetric call center would identify problems with wireless carrier systems more quickly, adjust its own systems and choice of carriers for better connectivity, and send any needed changes back to the mobile phone including updates to mobile phones, modems and their roaming lists. In addition, a call center could ascertain connectivity issues of specific cellular markets.
It would be desirable, therefore, to provide a method of reporting connectivity problems of a mobile vehicle that would result in monitoring the service provided by wireless carrier systems, increasing the reliability of telemetric services, and overcoming the deficiencies and obstacles described above.